For the Love of a Boat - High Idle - Jeff Armstrong

Jeff & Nancy leaving Thomaston for Hupper Island

My dear friend Jeff Armstrong, who passed away on January 11 lived every day to the fullest.  On the day before he went to Portland for the last, heroic efforts to extend his life, I stood with him in his basement workshop as he carved another black walnut wooden spoon and instructed Kathryn's beau Max Holm on how to turn bowls on  the lathe.

One of his passions was his 1963 Thompson 21' - High Idle, which carried him and many friends and family for forty years to destinations on the St. George River and Muscongus Bay - from Thomaston to Monhegan.  That last destination is memorialized by James Wyeth - who painted it in gratitude for a mission of mercy Jeff once did for Jamie's wife.

Jeff

What do we mean when we say For the Love of  A Boat?  Many of us share a passion for wooden boats - but few have put more into theirs than Jeff did for High Idle.  Click on that link above for a special piece of writing by Jeff - completed three years to the day before his death - and published only now by his family and friends at Jeff's Marine.

The Pirate of the Mid-coast.
Why he thought that was a selling point none will ever know.

Issuma reaches Antarctica

Richard Hudson has achieved his dream: After a peaceful journey across the 400 mile Drake Passage he and his crew aboard Issuma arrived at the protected harbor of Deception Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica.  They've been at Maxwell Bay for a while - at Jaroslav Pavlicek's Eco-Nelson base. Nice spot.  Check it out here at ISSUMA.  - George

Lost Navy tug USS Conestoga found

The men of the lost USS Conestoga.
NOAA researchers have found the Navy tug USS Conestoga.  In 1921 it was lost on its way to Samoa, was sank just twenty miles of so outside San Francisco, near the Farallon islands where it probably sought refuge,  The New York Times reports

1936 Cape Horn

http://sailingcruisingscotlandtv.com/video/b7vygh6my2ld

Rainbow - 360 degrees - The Weather Channel

I remember a spring day like this - one rainbow after another as Taisy and I drove from Clare through the lakes of Killarney to Kinsale. Unfortunately Taisy lost the film. This sort of makes up for it. - gwc

https://www.facebook.com/TheWeatherChannel/videos/10154092334385921/

A magnificent full-circle rainbow was filmed by a drone in Cookstown, Ireland. If you look closely, you can see that part of it makes up a double rainbow!
Posted by The Weather Channel on Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Lumber Yard Skiff Scrapbook — Old Wharf Dory

Skiff Scrapbook — Old Wharf Dory



A Lumberyard Skiff - of the type we built five years ago at Wooden Boat
School with the creator Walter Baron.



The first Lumberyard Skiff - 1993, seen here in 2015



A newbie

Coast Guard RIB capsizes in surf during rescue of trawler

https://tugster.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/astrand/

Brooklyn Navy Yard

Taisy took me on a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the historic industrial park where the battleships USS Maine,  Arizona, and Missouri were built.  The NYC Economic Development Corporation is engaged in its transformation to modern industrial use, while its massive dry docks continue to service ships, and its wharves provide a base for the Fire Department.
I took the phone, instead of a high resolution camera.  I'll have to go back with the Nikon.

Happy Valentine's Day

Why J Dilla May Be Jazz's Latest Great Innovator : A Blog Supreme : NPR

Taisy persuaded me to stretch out...and listen to hip hop. I dunno but I definitely want to hear more from Dilla.  - GWC



Why J Dilla May Be Jazz's Latest Great Innovator : A Blog Supreme : NPR

by Giovanni Russonello

• Visionary hip-hop producer J Dilla never found mainstream success during his brief lifetime. But in the seven years since his death, Dilla — who would have turned 39 today — has come to represent a major inflection point on hip-hop's evolutionary tree. At his peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he suggested syntheses that hadn't seemed possible. He played fresh games with texture and tone. He recast the sample as a malleable component, rather than the monochromatic backbone it had seemed to be. And he injected a softened, swaggering humanity into the rigid slap of classic hip-hop drumbeats.
• His magnum opus, Donuts, was reissued on vinyl last month, and the posthumous Music From the Lost Scrolls Vol. 1 came out on Tuesday — the first in a series of previously unreleased recordings. In Detroit on Saturday, the rapper Talib Kweli, violinist and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and a handful of other artists will perform at the second annual Dilla Day, a concert celebrating Dilla's career.
• Dilla's reach stretches way beyond hip-hop: For one, he's recently cast a long shadow over contemporary jazz. He never belonged to jazz's inner circle, but since his death in 2006 from a rare blood disease, his legacy has helped pull the genre back into kissing contact with modern popular music.
• 
  
• "He's so important," says jazz drummer Karriem Riggins, who collaborated extensively with Dilla and is himself a hip-hop producer. "Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams and Miles [Davis]: He's in the same category to me."